B009XDDVN8 EBOK (38 page)

“And what was it you really wanted?” I said with a touch of bitterness. “What didn’t I steal enough to be able to afford to give you?”

“A love affair with my husband,” she said. “That’s all I ever wanted out of my marriage. But there was always something in you that killed the chance of it. That’s why I broke up with you the first time. Because there were too many barriers to get through, with no promise of what was behind them. And then I found a relationship where there were no barriers, where we breathed each other’s breaths. His name was François, and I lost myself in him.”

“François?”

“Yes.”

“French?”

“Canadian.”

“Fake French, then, like a Starbucks croissant.”

“He was my great love, Jonathon. How does that make you feel, hearing that?”

“Like I’m getting what I deserve. You don’t need to do this.”

“Oh, yes I do. I never told you about him, but we’re telling our secrets, right? Not all of them, but some. Boys like François, they exist to break your heart, and so he did. The devastation, my God. It was like a natural disaster. When you reappeared, I was an invalid, ready for some distance. It was my fault, I admit it. You were about all I could handle at the time. And I thought you would open up at some point. I thought you simply had a trust issue, and if I built the trust, then when you did open up it would be like it was with François, closer than close, without the pain. But I kept waiting, and you kept moving further away. I couldn’t figure it out, it didn’t make sense. All I knew was that I couldn’t bear it anymore. And now I know what was behind it.”

“It was just something I did when I was young.”

“No, Jonathon. It was something you did every day of our life together. I never even understood the tattoo until now. My God, I have no idea who the hell you are.”

“We’ve been married seventeen years.”

“You’re a complete and utter stranger.”

“It doesn’t matter that I told you?”

“You told me seventeen years too late and only because you had no choice. What else don’t I know?”

“When they came after Augie I was going to run away. I’d already created a new identity for myself. Edward Holt, with a pretty decent picture on the passport, I must add. I was going to fake my death and run away with what was left of the money and leave you with the life insurance.”

“You cowardly son of a bitch.”

“It was going to be for your own good. And it’s not like you weren’t going to divorce me anyway if I stayed around. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave you or the kids or our lives. I love my life. I love my kids. I love you.”

“Don’t.”

“And after this is over,” I said, “I’ll do anything to make it work. Anything.”

She turned and looked at me for a long moment, looked at me as if I were an interesting specimen, a dead jellyfish that the tide had deposited onto the moonlit sand.

“Exactly who is after us?” she said.

“A motorcycle madman. The money was hidden in his house. He turned state’s evidence when he was arrested. He’s in the witness protection program now, but he hired some bounty hunter to go after us.”

“How’d he find out it was you three?”

“I don’t know. None of us would have given up the others; Augie, Ben, and I, we were brothers. That’s the one thing I can trust absolutely.”

“What are you going to do about this motorcycle man?”

“I’m trying to find him. That’s why I went back to my old hometown. I have one chance to get his location. It’s a long shot, but it’s the only shot I have.”

“And if you do find him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can get the Marshals Service involved or something. I’ll figure out what to do when it happens.”

“That’s a good plan, Jonathon. That makes me feel so secure. And we’re supposed to stay hiding out with that woman until you figure it out.”

“It’s safer, I think, than anything else. Though not as safe as I thought. Thad told me that they knew about Harry.”

“Thad?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thad.”

“You spoke to Thad?”

“I had to find out what was happening in Patriots Landing. Evidently a lot.”

“I’m going to my sister’s.”

“Caitlin, no. They’ll find you there.”

“Then I’ll figure out something else. I’m not sitting like a stuffed doll, waiting for them to find me here. We’ll go somewhere until it all blows over. And it will blow over quickly, right?”

“I’ll try. But even if I don’t find Derek, there might be another way. I was offered a deal by the bounty hunter. He promised to call the whole thing off for a payment. He’s offering to be bought.”

“For how much?”

“For more than the money I have left. But I could cash out whatever equity we have in the house, take out what we have in our retirement funds, borrow the rest. It would pretty much wipe us out.”

“And you need me to agree. You need my signature.”

“Yes.”

“And then it would be over?”

“That’s what he says. I don’t know if I trust him.”

“Do we have a choice but to trust him?”

“Not if I can’t find the guy he works for.”

She stood up, dusted the sand off her legs with a few quick slashes of her hand. “Do what you have to, Jonathon. Do what you have to and get these bastards out of our lives.”

“I will.”

“And then you get the hell out of our lives, too.”

I
AM LYING
next to my wife, alone in the night, because that’s the way it is now when I lie next to my wife. Outside the wind rustles the leaves, outside a dog barks, outside something ferocious waits. And I have nothing to fight it with.

In the middle of the nameless night there is only a present tense. My wife’s back is turned to me, her spine a familiar barbed wall keeping me out. We are sleeping together on a full bed in the tiny second guest room, but not by choice. Back from the beach, Caitlin had wanted nothing more to do with me, I could tell, and I hadn’t wanted to taste her angry disdain all night. But by the time we got back, Shelby and Eric were asleep in the first guest room and Harry was sacked out and snoring on the couch, which left us only the other bedroom with the single bed.

But we are long married, we know how to sleep apart on the same mattress.

I lie in bed with my shirt off and my arms behind my head, my eyes open, staring at the darkness that flows like smoke within the atoms of the ceiling, staring at my future. I am in that most frightening of places, the zone between the before and the after. If my life has been guided by the secret for the last quarter century, what will guide it now? I have lost my job, my wife and family, my place in the world, and, if I make Clevenger’s deal, I will lose what was left of my money, too. I will have nothing.
Bob Dylan made it sound romantic, but he was only twenty-four when he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone”—what the hell did that pup know? I am forty-two and lost in the darkness. If I thought I was free before, I had no idea of the true terror of freedom pure.

A sound as soft as a breath. “What were you thinking?”

It takes me a moment to realize it isn’t my subconscious whispering to me, it is my wife.

“I thought you were asleep,” I whisper back.

“I knew you weren’t. You breathe differently when you’re awake.”

“How do I breathe when I’m awake?”

“Like you’re hiding something.”

She’s right. I can remember bouts of sleeplessness where I limited my breathing so she wouldn’t know I wasn’t blissfully dreaming, so she wouldn’t ask me about the abject terrors keeping me up all night.

“That’s the old me,” I say. “Now it’s utter honesty to the end. What I’m thinking about, if you really want to know, is the existential muddle that is my life.”

“Is that what your life is?”

“And I’m being generous.”

I feel the mattress shift, I feel her turn to me. When did that happen last? A faint heat washes over the side of my body. The size of the bed has forced her as close to me as possible without touching.

“It’s brave of you to share your existential anxiety, but I’m not asking about that now,” she says, her whisper full of a real curiosity. “I’m asking about then. What were you thinking when you took all that money?”

“I don’t know. I was young, and stupid. And quite high, I might add.”

“Smoke much?”

“Augie, Ben, and I, we were total heads in high school,” I say.

“Really? I can’t imagine it, you’re, like, the straightest man I know.”

“There’s nothing so straight as a reformed pot smoker.”

“But what was actually going through your brain when you took the money?”

“I had a chip on my shoulder. Through the whole of my childhood, after my father left, I felt like I was living through someone else’s bad dream. When you feel like that, the only thing you’re not willing to do is play it safe. I stumbled on these buckets full of cash and I saw a way out, a way to get everything I had always felt deprived of.”

“It just seems so not you. You’re always cautious, careful, you always run from confrontation. It’s like I’m lying here next to a stranger.”

“That’s marriage for you.”

“No, this is beyond the usual suburban-marriage-midlife-growing-apart thing. With everything you’ve told me, I realize I don’t know you at all.” The warmth on my side gets a little warmer. Something brushes my chest. An accidental touch from her hand? Her breast?

“Do you like it?” I say.

“Like what?”

“Being in bed with a total stranger.”

“A little.”

I feel her press up against me, I feel her chin on my chest, I feel myself stiffen.

“So the less you know me,” I say, “the more interesting I get.”

“That’s about right.”

“There is so much you don’t know,” I say, laughing.

In the darkness I remember the first time I slept with Caitlin in Wisconsin. She was small and thin, with interesting eyes, but nothing out of the ordinary. I was drunk enough that it wasn’t her I was after so much as the sex. It could have been the girl down the hall, or the field hockey player in my statistics class—I was game. But the girl down the hall was studying and the field hockey player was dating a football star and so that night I ended
up with skinny little Caitlin from Intro Philosophy. U2 had just put out
The Joshua Tree
and “With or Without You” was playing on my stereo when the vest came off, and the baggy sweater, and the glasses, and the T-shirt, and suddenly all I wanted was the girl I was with. Her arms long and slender, her breasts fuller than ever I had imagined, her thin waist and legs, the shockingly confident jut of her hips. Watching her undress was like opening a small box on Christmas and finding a pony inside. And during the sex itself, it didn’t feel like I was getting away with something, the way it felt with Madeline Worshack and all the ones after her, it felt like
we
were getting away with something, which is completely different. And after, after the laughter and the trembling jaw and the riotous chewing of each other’s lips, she kissed the sweat off the side of my neck and, in a gesture shockingly intimate, far more intimate than the sex that had preceded it, she placed her chin on my chest, stared at me with those eyes, and asked me if I really believed all that bullshit I had said in class about Kant.

In that instant it was as if I was discovering something bright and new in the world. And now, with her chin resting on the very same spot on my chest, it is as if I am rediscovering that very same thing. Only this time she isn’t asking about my warped take on the categorical imperative—more Ayn Rand than Immanuel—she is asking about its fruits.

“How much did you really end up with?” she says.

“I told you.”

“The exact amount, I mean.”

“Four hundred and twenty-four thousand, three hundred and ninety,” I say, “along with my part of a twenty-dollar bill that Augie, Ben, and I ripped into thirds.”

“Wow,” she says, her hand absently tapping my side.

“Yeah,” I say. “We didn’t know at the time that cutting up legal tender was a crime.”

But that
wow
is real, and hard earned. She is seeing it now as I always saw it, an unimaginable boon. It’s what the idea of easy
money does to everyone, it was how I made my living when I was still making a living, and it is almost disappointing to see her captured by it. But it is far from disappointing to have her talk to me without aggrievement in her voice.

She draws her chin closer to my face and lowers her voice. “And how much is left?”

“Less.”

“No, really, how much do we have left?”

In the ebb of the darkness and in the timbre of her whisper I can tell she is smiling, and the smile in her voice is so entrancing that I almost miss the pronoun and its import. I don’t understand anything that is happening, but my erection does, and we—my erection and I this time—both like it.

“We had about one eighty left before I went to Vegas. Augie had eighty hidden beneath the floor of his kitchen, which I took, along with his share of the twenty-dollar bill. Technically some of that eighty belongs to Ben, although I had lent him some over the years. And I gave ten to Harry for helping you and the kids escape, and ten to you, and I spent some. So let’s say I have about two hundred and ten left.”